Repeatedly over the past year and a half, noses of warm water have emerged from the heat overburdened Pacific. Massive, godzilla-like things delivering extraordinary warmth to thousands of miles of Equatorial Pacific surface waters. An epic ocean heat reflux that is now boosting human carbon emissions’ push to crack new record global high temperatures for 2014 and 2015. One that is resulting in far-flung extreme weather events around the globe and is, even now, injecting an obscene amount of record heat into the Arctic, setting off unprecedented wildfires and blasting plumes of permafrost burn smoke up and over the North Pole.

It’s a long succession of waves of Pacific warming that has continued in train since late winter of 2014. A trend of relentless ocean heating that has now driven Nino 3.4 values into the strong event range. A level of intense heat that models say will only grow stronger as the days, weeks and months progress on through Summer and into Fall.

(Extraordinary, high anomaly suface water heat now extends from the equator all the way to the polar zone. Image source: NOAA ESRL.)

According to NOAA’s most recent El Nino Report, Nino 3.4 values hit the strong El Nino threshold for the second week of July, 2015. Rising to +1.5 C above decadal averages, this region of the Central Pacific warmed into a hot zone reserved only for the most intense of El Ninos. A level that must be maintained for three months for a strong event to be declared. But as of last week, we’d crossed into that ominous territory.

This crossing of the strong El Nino threshold occurred even as extreme hot water anomalies extended up from the Equator, along the US West Coast and up into the Arctic Ocean itself. A set of anomalies that helped push PDO values into an also strong range of +1.5 for June, a re-intensification that ocean surface temperature signatures indicate is likely to further heighten through July.

Third Strong Warm Kelvin Wave Likely on the Way

Though Nino 3.4 just tipped into the strong event threshold this week, heating along the Equator was most intense in regions closer to South America. Nino 1+2, just off the coast saw values hit a +3.3 C positive anomaly. And Nino 3 ranged into +2.1 C territory. Though not yet near the 1998 peak monthly thresholds (just above 4 C for Nino 1+2 and near 3.5 C for Nino 3), these values are rapidly closing the gap.

(Cool Kelvin Wave is crushed by June-July westerlies as a Third Warm Kelvin Wave begins to develop at depth in the region of 170 East Longitude. Image source: NOAA El Nino.)

Nudged by a still ongoing Westerly Wind Burst (WWB), it appears another warm Kelvin Wave is starting to gather steam. This after a ‘cool’ wave was crushed by powerful cyclone development in the Western and Central Pacific during the past two weeks. Wind anomaly potentials in this region have been quite strong and widespread — rivaling the intensity of the record WWB of March of 2015 and showing an even broader zonal coverage.

Models are Still Going Bonkers

Last week, forecast models began to pick up the signal of this new and implied potential third warm Kelvin Wave development. Now, these same models show a heightened risk for record El Nino development with El Nino, in many cases, predicted to remain in the monstrous to record monstrous range from now until the winter of 2015-2016. PDF corrected model runs indicate an event that peaks out in the range of 2 C positive seasonal anomaly in the Nino 3.4 zone (just shy of the record 1998 event). Uncorrected ensemble runs including the ECMWF model show a much more extreme El Nino peaking out at 2.9 C positive anomaly in the seasonal average.

(NOAA model runs showing near record monster El Nino [top frame] and record monster El Nino [bottom frame] predicted to peak in October, November and December of 2015. Image source: NOAA CFS.)

An event of this kind would truly be a monster to settle all the record books. It’s an event we really, really don’t want to see. One that would likely push the already extraordinary +0.75 C above 20th Century temperatures we have for 2015 so far even higher. But it’s one that global forecast tools keep predicting with increasing certainty. It’s in the models constantly now. An endless litany week after week — deep ocean warming is coming back to haunt us.

labmonkery2

If I had any hatches to batten down, I would. I do live in whats called a ‘flood plane’ less that 100′ from the San Diego river, and about 30-35′ above current river level. Crossing fingers that this event will not overtax our local waterways and flood my neighborhood.

Nicholas Swenson

El Niño doesn’t ‘miss’ California per say. The climate condition is not a storm or a single weather event. However, the winter storms El Niño produces may impact regions further to the north if RRR remains in place.

Thanks, another helpful post Robert. I’m interested on how recent and future Kelvin waves impact the central pacific. If the waves are poking their noses up closer to the eastern pacific (typical El Nino) how does this affect central pacific – which is already off to a record start with three of the earliest tropical storms recorded?

The warm Kelvin Wave dives down in WPAC, surfaces in EPAC and then the warm surface waters back up through CPAC. That’s basically the way it works out. In the end, you get strong CPAC warming. And we’ve already seen some of that.

labmonkery2

Another interesting, but not complete, study on impacts of CC on death rate in the US. Although we witnessed some of that first hand in India and Pakistan earlier this year.http://phys.org/news/2015-07-climate-american.html
And as usual, the comments are beyond belief.

Phil

Robert, did you see any reports about the recent prediction of a mini ice age in around 2030 linked to drop in sunspot production by the sun. Seems it was published in some Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales by a. Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University. It was also reported on in the Daily Mail and other such outlets so the deniers would be really pushing it.

It will be dismissed as utter BS by any climate scientist worth their salt. The human forcing is an order of magnitude stronger than even the most severe solar variance. We are in a phase of declining solar activity now, so where’s the cooling?

Phil

I found the following interesting discussion on Zharkova’s recent conference paper mentioned above which also looks at some other recent work on sunspot and global warming.

As a conference paper, it has not been refereed as yet and there appears to be no academic peer reviews out there on it as yet. Also, Zharkova appears to be firmly in the climate denier camp. See the following for more details:

hot whopper indeed. Beware physicists mascarading as climate scientists and claiming solar variance will have any marked impact on the ridiculous human heat forcing. This is just a recycling of the same old crap. There’s nothing new here. Just hitting refresh on an old and endlessly disproven climate change denier meme. They just found some new name to take the FF donation dollars.

labmonkery2

This even made the local 10pm news on San Diego KUSI today. With an end of story caveat that this report needed peer review and further study. Lies certainly travel faster than truths.
Golly Jeepers, Mr. Wilson.

Greg

Absolutely agree RS. Anyone have Tom Steyer’s ear? I think they have been beating us even better than ISIS in the online game, and they’ve been stopping progress more than any other single reason IMHO, and probably laughing at us behind closed doors. I would love to expose them decisively and drag them through the mud.

Masses of feeding whales showed up off the coast of Northern California this month in what marine officials are calling record-breaking numbers, leading a local marine sanctuary to ask boaters to beware of the gentle giants.

Marine biologists sighted 93 humpback whales, 21 blue whales and a fin whale in a single hour on July 4 while looking off the coast of the South Farallon Islands, said Mary Jane Schramm,

UC Santa Cruz team reports first direct measurement of heat flow from deep within the Earth to the bottom of the West Antarctic ice sheet

Lead author Andrew Fisher, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, emphasized that the geothermal heating reported in this study does not explain the alarming loss of ice from West Antarctica that has been documented by other researchers. “The ice sheet developed and evolved with the geothermal heat flux coming up from below–it’s part of the system. But this could help explain why the ice sheet is so unstable. When you add the effects of global warming, things can start to change quickly,” he said.

Colorado Bob

Fish swimming over a bed of angular gravel at the grounding zone. The gravel and smaller sediments covering this seafloor fall out of the base of the melting ice sheet that is located here about 30 feet above the seafloor. WISSARD scientists observed in the several hours of taking video, a number of gravels and many smaller fragments falling down on the seafloor. This may be why benthic life (e.g. sea stars, sponges, urchins) has not established itself on this seafloor because they would be pelted by the rock fragments falling from above. However, fish are agile enough to avoid these projectiles as they take advantage of these seemingly desert-like feeding grounds. (Image credit: Deep-SCINI UNL-Andrill SMO).

Andy in San Diego

“Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere”—itself a follow-up to their original study, “NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science,”

labmonkery2

Colorado Bob

james cole

Well, in the coming months, we will have some epic weather, and some real physics lessons coming our way. By now we are familiar with what arctic warming has done to the jet stream, have we ever had an El Nino occur at the same time our jet stream has been so disjointed and prone to deep waves? I’m just wondering how the two together might make this El Nino different from your standard El Nino of the past. Do the old models still hold up or is there potential for some really strange behavior.

wili

Good questions. It might be informative to have an overview of expected consequences at various places of the Uber-Super El Nino that seems to be building. I read somewhere that the effects on South Asian monsoons depended on the heating being concentrated in the Central Pacific rather than the East, but I don’t know how robust such observations are.

Continued cycling of heat into the Arctic up through the hot blobs, the PNW, and Alaska, resulting in severe wildfires, continued drought in many places (but broken in other places by extreme monsoonal rainfall, and continued strong to severe weakening of sea ice. Moving south, we look at dangerous drought for Central America, South America and the Carribean continuing for at least another six months. Asia monsoon and mass casualty heat waves are already past. But many of the hydrological effects for SE Asia could still continue. Moving toward Fall and winter we have risk of severe Pacific and Atlantic Ocean storms. The positioning of these storms depends on how the ridge/trough pattern sets up. If the RRR goes down, we have very strong storms impacting California and the U.S. West Coast. These storms will necessarily be amplified by the added atmospheric heat and moisture loading over the past 17 years. So there’s a bit of dice loading for more extreme effects. If the RRR doesn’t go down you end up with the very odd situation where the storm track cycles into Alaska. In either case, you get a pretty amazingly deep trough over the U.S. East. With very warm waters in the backed up Gulf Stream off the U.S. East Coast, you have the high T deltas necessary for very powerful nor’easter formation. Location of the trough will determine where these storms are strongest. Early model guidance points to very extreme rainfall potentials for FL, with some rather deep (bombification) storms all up and down the eastern seaboard.

Even if the RRR holds, the warm waters in NEPAC will be driven into the coastal zones over coming months. Expect very weird impacts to sea life as well as increasingly severe ocean stratification and chemistry changes over the next few months at least. If the RRR holds, we are looking at permanent and terrible sea life impacts. This is a risk due to a likely shift in PDO to positive phase.

For Asia, the fire situation appears most severe in the hot dipole over East Asia. We already have flaring of fires in the region that has been heavily impacted since April, with the large fire zone spreading north and east.

RRR persistence for at least the next few months will also tend to direct storms toward Kamchatka, The Bering and Alaska. Given the warm Alaska, Bering and Irkutsk environments and the colder Arctic (with variances in the range of 70-80 F over just a couple hundred miles in cases) there is increasing risk of strong storm development over or near the ESS, Chuckchi, and Beaufort as Summer progresses and moisture loading moves north. The impacts of these storms has a potential to be freakish, spreading powerful waves along Arctic Ocean zones and coastlines that typically do not see these impacts. Low lying cities like Barrow may be particularly impacted if heightened risk for these storms bears out.

El Nino typically amplifies the Pacific storm track during winter. The west to east progression of winds and storms tends to preferentially cool waters that are currently in the hot blob zone. If this happens, it would reduce the underpinnings of the RRR and allow storm propagation to the US west coast. Such a switch could be quite extreme — going from very dry to very wet quite rapidly.

It’s basically a battle between the RRR and the preferentially amplified Pacific Storm track during a strong El Nino that’s in play. If PDO is strong and the blob maintains and the RRR holds sway, then the storms are heading toward Alaska. If the storm track is very strong, if the blob starts to fade as the west to east meridional winds intensify and if the RRR goes down, then the powerful troughs will start slamming into the US West Coast.

Colorado Bob

That was the best hot spring in Colorado. In 1971 . Fame had not yet killed it. When you sat in it, the bubbles flowed up around your good parts. It was about 80 F degrees. And clean as water gets. You can still go there , Valley View Hot Springs. Due East of Villa Grove, off US 285 North end of San Luis Valley.

Colorado Bob

GOURD CANTEEN …..
These things are very very old, and appear all over the world. This one is lined with beeswax. The white stuff is raw hide, and the plug on top is made from a deer antler tip. I was lucky enough to do some work for the Autry Museum of the West and gave it to my contact there. A canteen almost like this one appears in a Fredrick Remmington painting in their collection.

Colorado Bob

MY MOCCASINS ….
Sorry for the poor picture, I was never very good about taking pictures of my work. These are made from two types of elk skin for the uppers, and an alum tanned cow hide soles & bead work.

The blonde uppers are made of a thick split oil tanned elk, the darker leather is a green elk & is fringed. The soles are wet molded, are 1/4 of an inch thick, and have the toe that Apache’s were fond of using. They buttoned up the side using Indian head penny buttons.

Colorado Bob

MY CAPOTE OR BLANKET COAT …..
This thing is a dark forest green, and is made from Whitney Point Trade blanket & elk skin. It has antler buttons. Again, the designs in the elk are burnt into the leather.

Colorado Bob

Colorado Bob

One more –
A shirt made with just holes and fringe , pure ice age tech . No lace, One piece has a double row of holes, the other has very fine fringe . You stick the fringe through the holes and tie a knot.

Dear Colorado Bob, been following you on Jeff Master’s blog, etc and I very much appreciate your info-gatherings, wisdom and concern for our planet. Please keep doing what you do. we need you! Remember “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” Revealing the truth of this darkness calls forth the light, awakening us into action and creating the vibrant planet we yearn for! Yes?

“river flooding will worsen in the coming years, with the biggest disruptions expected in Asia – mostly India, followed by Bangladesh and China.

Kashmir’s environment department has forecast that the number of rainy days in the Himalayan region could increase by five to 10 days on average in the 2030s, and by more than 15 days in Jammu and Kashmir.”

“A 1-metre rise in global sea levels increases the probability of what is now a once-in-a-hundred-year flood by 1,000 times in Kolkata, 40 times in Shanghai and 200 times in New York, showed a multi-nation, multi-organization study on risk assessment for climate change”

In the Pliocene, global temperatures 1 – 2 °C warmer than present came with at least 6 m of rise,” Rahmstorf wrote. Thus, while we may not currently be committed to raising seas as much as occurred in these past periods, if we don’t get global warming under control, that could change.

Rahmstorf has previously published results suggesting that if we hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, we might thereby hold sea levels to 1.5 meters above where they were in the year 2000 by the year 2300. Warm things up by 2 degrees C, though, and you’d get a 50 percent chance of more than 2.7 meters, the study suggested, by 2300.

Other recent research, meanwhile, has similarly implied that for every degree Celsius that we warm the planet, we’re could be committed to 2.3 meters of sea level rise.

Much like Rahmstorf, Dutton agreed that we’re not committed to 6 meters — yet. However, she said, “we’re getting very close to where we see, repeatedly in the paleo record, something like 6 meters from that type of temperature change.”

In order to prevent that level of rise, atmospheric greenhouse gasses need to start falling. So my question to experts who disagree with these rates of sea level rise is this — how soon can we get those ghg levels to fall to more reasonable levels.

wili

The huge increases in likelihood of extreme flooding of coastal cities with even a one meter rise is what most people don’t get. They think, “Oh, the water will be rising slowly, so we’ll have plenty of time to prepare. But that’s not how it’s going to pan out.

First of all, almost no coastal areas anywhere in the world are preparing with anything like the kind of urgency even the most likely scenarios would require.

But more importantly, most areas will go through years where nothing much seems to be different is going on besides some ‘nuisance’ flooding (Florida Denialese for slr washing away roads and buildings).

But then one of these 100-year or worse monster storms will come along and just wipe out or severely damage entire cities–think Haihan with 40 foot surges and worse. These are the kinds of storms (I’ll say it again–and worse) that will likely be hitting populated coasts and cities somewhere in the world every single year, or multiple times a year.

Not sure how long global civ can take that kind of pounding on top of everything else.

When we turned to fossil-death-fuels as our primary fuel source, we were essentially declaring war on the future. That war is now falling around our heads, and we will be on the losing side, even as we continue to ‘arm’ the ‘enemy’ at the rate of ~ 1/2 billion atom bombs a day…

A friend just returned from a “cruise” on the Elbe R. Or rather bus tour since the river was almost dry. Temps in 90s, 100s. No fans. Many deaths not much reported here. Surprise, surprise. Wasn’t quite as much fun as he’d hoped.

Gee, that wasn’t too clear was it? Supposed to be a fancy river cruise but the River Elbe was too low to float the boat. It was hot and no one had fans, much less AC. He heard that there were deaths all over Europe from the heat. I read it was 104.6 in Kitzingen, Germany at the time.

I would like to interview you about this post and your work more generally on my talk show that airs 9-noon east coast and for Progressive Maryland where I blog. I have written extensively at http://www.halginsberg.com on the ongoing human-caused ecological collapse. If you are interested, please email me.